Early Britain eBook

Throughout the whole of the ninth century, however,
and the early part of the tenth, the whole history
of England is the history of a perpetual pillage.
No man who sowed could tell whether he might reap or
not. The Englishman lived in constant fear of
life and goods; he was liable at any moment to be
called out against the enemy. Whatever little
civilisation had ever existed in the country died out
almost altogether. The Latin language was forgotten
even by the priests. War had turned everybody
into fighters; commerce was impossible when the towns
were sacked year after year by the pirates. But
in the rare intervals of peace, AElfred did his best
to civilise his people. The amount of work with
which he is credited is truly astonishing. He
translated into English with his own hand “The
History of the World,” by Orosius; Baeda’s
“Ecclesiastical History;” Boethius’s
“De Consolatione,” and Gregory’s
“Regula Pastoralis.” At his court,
too, if not under his own direction, the English Chronicle
was first begun, and many of the sentences quoted
from that great document in this work are probably
due to AElfred himself. His devotion to the church
was shown by the regular communication which he kept
up with Rome, and by the gifts which he sent from
his impoverished kingdom, not only to the shrine of
St. Peter but even to that of St. Thomas in India.
No doubt his vigorous personality counted for much
in the struggle with the Danes; but his death in 901
left the West Saxons as ready as ever to contend against
the northern enemy.

One result of the Danish invasion of Wessex must not
be passed over. The common danger seems to have
firmly welded together Welshman and Saxon into a single
nationality. The most faithful part of AElfred’s
dominions were the West Welsh shires of Somerset and
Devon, with the half Celtic folk of Dorset and Wilts.
The result is seen in the change which comes over
the relations between the two races. In Ine’s
laws the distinction between Welshmen and Englishmen
is strongly marked; the price of blood for the servile
population is far less than that of their lords:
in AElfred’s laws the distinction has died out.
Compared to the heathen Dane, West Saxons and West
Welsh were equally Englishmen. From that day
to this, the Celtic peasantry of the West Country have
utterly forgotten their Welsh kinship, save in wholly
Cymric Cornwall alone. The Devon and Somerset
men have for centuries been as English in tongue and
feeling as the people of Kent or Sussex.

CHAPTER XV.

THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH.

The history of the tenth century and the first half
of the eleventh consists entirely of the continued
contest between the West Saxons and the Scandinavians.
It falls naturally into three periods. The first
is that of the English reaction, when the West Saxon
kings, Eadward and AEthelstan, gradually reconquered
the Danish North by inches at a time. The second
is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and Eadgar
held together the whole of Britain for a while in
the hands of a single West Saxon over-lord. The
third is that of the decadence, when, under AEthelred,
the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish
kings, Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over all
England, including even the unconquered Wessex of
AElfred himself.